It's going to be hard.
I'm going to start by saying that the most effective way of undermining or crippling the management of an immigration program is to allow a backlog to develop. Unfortunately, that's what happened when the 2001 immigration act was passed. It did not, for some strange reason, contain any mechanism for controlling the flow of immigrants, and the act said, paraphrasing section 11, that anyone who met the selection criteria “shall” be accepted.
Of course, the department should have realized that there are many thousands of people out in the world who can meet our selection criteria at any one time. What happened was that within months a backlog began to build up. The government attempted—I think in 2002, less than a year after the act was put into effect—to correct that by saying that all those in the backlog would have to meet a higher mark on the selection criteria. That, of course, was ruled by the courts to be illegal and unlawful.
So nothing was done about the backlog until 2008, when, by that time, it had reached a million people waiting to come in. That's like the province of Saskatchewan being outside, waiting to come to Canada.
There was an attempt in 2008, and it was moderately successful, by the previous minister to Minister Kenney, to control that to some degree by first of all changing the act so that it meant that anyone, even though they met the selection criteria, “may” be accepted, not “shall” be accepted; there was no obligation to accept everybody who met the criteria. That was an important step, and it was difficult to get through. In fact, it had to be included in the budget to ensure that it would get through.
At any rate, that was helpful. Later, as the minister said this morning, they put a cap on the skilled worker component of the movement. That, as Richard has mentioned, has also been quite successful.
The problem is that there still remain many thousands, basically of grandparents and parents, in the backlog.
One of the adverse results of having a massive backlog is that people who want to get here find other ways of doing so. That has resulted in what I consider to be one of the most serious implications of the backlog, and that is that it allowed the tremendous development of the temporary foreign worker program, something that we in Canada had always avoided, knowing what happened to Europe in the 1960s and 1970s with the guest worker program. Thousands of guest workers came into Germany, France, and other countries of Europe, but of course they didn't go home. They're there now and have formed a large underclass in many European cities. It's a serious problem.
We avoided that like the plague until the backlog developed and employers, who wanted and needed skilled workers, found another route of getting them: they got them as temporary foreign workers.
Last year there were 283,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada. That figure, when you add it to the 280,000 immigrants who came in, is significantly large. On top of that you have roughly 250,000 foreign students in Canada, and the foreign workers and probably many of the students are not going home. You can be sure of that.
That's the adverse impact, because many of the so-called skilled temporary workers are not so skilled. They don't have to meet any requirements, basically. They don't have to meet education skills or education and training. Many of them are unskilled and are the first to suffer if there is a layoff.
The problem here, really, if you look at it, is that the current government has lost control of the immigration program. Of the 280,000 or so immigrants who came to Canada, I would guess that only about 20% or fewer were selected or controlled by the federal government. I have figures here, but of the 280,000 who came in, 214,000 had nothing to do with the federal government except being checked for criminality and medical.... They were brought in by employers, they were brought in by provinces, they were brought in by relatives, or they consisted of refugees and humanitarian cases and several thousand live-in care workers or caregivers.
In effect, as far as I'm concerned, the federal government has lost control of the movement.
Add to that the asylum system, in which there is a backlog again of some 50,000 waiting. Again, even if they are found not to be genuine by the board, the chances are that they won't be sent home. That, I think, is a serious problem.
Until the backlog problem is resolved, I don't think that any department or any minister is going to be able to manage the program effectively.
How could the problem be solvedt? Richard has given some solutions. My own view is that we have a legal as well as a moral obligation to let the parents and grandparents in. I think it was a mistake to put the sponsored category in the act, as was done. Normally in the past we only accepted parents if they were over the age of 60 and grandparents if they were over the age of 65. Opening it up to parents of any age means we're getting a lot of parents who are in their forties and fifties and who are entering the labour force.
But that's beside the point. The current problem, I think, is that until you get rid of the backlog, you're not going to be able to manage the immigration program effectively. I would suggest that the way to do it is through a variation of what Richard is suggesting or by biting the bullet and letting the parents and grandparents in, at the cost that will accrue to us in health care and other things.
Thank you.